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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9553925" data-attributes="member: 7006">I agree that none of these high-powered mages would do things just to be helpful and for the betterment of society... but rather they would do it to make lots and lots of money.  But that's the thing... other than a little bit in Eberron involving the dragonmarked houses... we never even see businesses and companies spring up and form around powerful magic businesses to make themselves money.  Where's the Thomas Edison of magic?  The Henry Ford?  Creating companies and putting money into new discoveries and advances in magic to make themselves even money, and then other companies building on those discoveries to take magic even further still.There is so much money to be made in the magic trade that it is silly to think that people would let this goldmine of an industry just sit sallow for centuries except for a handful of people each year deciding to become mages and then go off "adventuring".  Why make money by becoming a captain of magical industry when you can instead keep risking your life every week looking for abandoned gold coins left in old caves and guarded by creatures that want to rip your face off instead?  Makes perfect sense!  And this doesn't even bring up the entire military magical complex, with governments funding advancements in magical technology to better defeat their enemies.  Leaders would be paying for the best and brightest to learn about all this new-fangled magic and then find ways to use it for national defense-- which would then lead to those inventions arriving into the private sector and pushing society forward from there.Look, I know trying to apply logic to the evolution of magic as we saw with the evolution of technology in the "real world" makes for less interesting storytelling.  But even if we wish to keep our heads buried in the sand just to keep our knights and horses fantasy stories alive... we can at least admit to ourselves that it makes no sense.  Hell... we see the same thing in Star Wars, where the exact same people wear the exact same clothing, use the exact same weapons, and have the exact same types of space ships over tens of thousands of years from the Old Republic all the way through to the New Jedi Order... and where society and culture has not advanced at all.  Yeah, we want to keep Star Wars as Star Wars no matter when we set it and with absolutely zero evolution... but at some point we have to just admit that it just doesn't make a lick of sense.</blockquote>

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